Shadow Dragon: The Fallen Angel Is My Teacher-Chapter 187: Angry Yuna, Locating Charlotta’s Brother

I nodded to Saint Dexter without any particular emotion.

’Yuna,’ I called out in my mind.

"Yes, Lord of Shadows?"

’There is a chance the people I’m going to meet will try to manipulate my mind at some point.’

’If you notice the manipulation, but I can’t, then use Beautify to improve your appearance.’

’There are many tricks that can block perception, which would lead me to not notice what my opponent is doing.’

’That’s why you will warn me through Beautify. It will be our basic tool to warn me from now on.’

"Understood, Lord of Shadows," Yuna replied.

Her tone shifted the moment she finished speaking.

The lightness that usually lingered in her voice disappeared, replaced by something focused and steady.

Well, that was normal.

We had entered the base of our enemies.

This wasn’t a place where mistakes could be corrected.

If one thing went wrong, it wouldn’t just be a setback. It would be the end.

’Also, use the luck-increasing ability.’

"Done," she said.

A faint glow flickered across my hand, warm for just a moment before fading away as if it had never been there.

By then, the massive city gates had come fully into view.

They were towering walls reinforced with layers of metal and glowing lines that ran across their surface-like veins beneath skin.

The machinery embedded in them moved in slow, constant patterns, as if the City itself was breathing.

The moment we passed through, people rushed toward us.

"Welcome, Rune Sage. We’ve heard a lot about you. How about you come with me, and I’ll help you familiarize yourself with the City?"

"Greetings, Rune Sage. I’m the HR Head of P Corp. I came here personally to recruit you."

"Rune Sage, we finally meet. Please, come to the M Corp sector. I promise you won’t be disappointed."

"Rune Sage—"

"Rune—"

Their voices overlapped, one after another, until it became a wall of sound.

Faces leaned in. Hands gestured. Smiles appeared, each one practiced in a slightly different way.

Right now, I was a hot potato. Everyone wanted a piece of me.

I slowed my pace and looked at each of them in turn without saying a word. I let them speak, and I listened.

’Ten corporations came to recruit me.’

’The other sixteen didn’t come.’

For a place where most of them didn’t care about the outside world, ten was a high number.

I had expected seven or eight at most.

The fact that this many showed up meant my value was higher than I had predicted.

Saint Dexter stepped forward and raised his hand.

"Alright. Calm down, all of you."

The recruiters quieted.

Unlike how one would expect them to respect Saint Dexter since he was called ’Saint’, they just looked at him as if they were looking at a company employee that was lower ranked than them.

Only the person from M Corp smiled.

Saint Dexter was their product, after all. The one they had operated on, rebuilt, and sent back out into the world.

I noticed another smile as well. This one came from the representative of P Corp.

’I can understand why M Corp is smiling. They ’created’ Saint Dexter. But why is this guy smiling?’ I thought.

Saint Dexter cleared his throat and continued.

"The Head Corporations have ordered us to guard Rune Sage until he decides which corporation to join. They have no intention of fighting over him, so you can recruit him. But do it properly. Not like this."

The people gathered there began to look at one another, measuring expressions, shifting their stances.

’If the Head Corporations don’t want me right now, then it’s one of two things.’

’Either they don’t think my abilities are special, or they don’t trust me.’

It was definitely the second.

They wanted to observe. Let me spend time with the smaller and mid-level Corps. Watch how I behaved. See what kind of person I really was.

Only then would they decide if I was worth pulling in.

While Saint Dexter continued speaking with the recruiters, Saint Maverick approached me from the side.

"How are you planning to decide which Corp to join?" he asked quietly.

"I’ll take a tour of the City. I’ll join the Corp whose Sector manages to amaze me."

"You’ll judge the sectors, not the corporations?"

"Yes."

I already knew which Corp I had to join.

It would be the easiest to take over.

But before any of that, there was something far more important.

Charlotta’s brother.

Henry.

I had to find him.

This was where the hard part began.

’Find one person in a place as big as Russia is hard.’

’Doing it without anyone knowing I’m looking for someone is harder.’

’They will be suspicious how I know about Henry if I suddenly start asking about him.’

’And searching in restricted areas isn’t even possible yet, since those areas will be heavily guarded.’

For now, I did exactly what I said I would.

I toured.

Yuna had used her luck increasing ability on me, and since I had no bad luck right now, there was a chance that I would get a lot of good luck.

It might help me find Henry, Charlotta’s brother, by chance.

’If I can’t find Henry within one week, I will have to start taking drastic measures.’

Someone might think searching like this, touring the city with no destination in mind, was a stupid method.

But since I had increased my luck, it was actually possible to find Henry or clues to his location.

During the day, my Shadow wore the disguise of Caelum Nocthera and moved through the Sectors in my place.

At night, I came myself.

I could always feel the eyes on me.

Hidden drones hovered just out of sight, their presence like a faint pressure against the back of my mind. Corporate recruiters followed at a distance, pitching their Corp.

Saint Dexter, Saintess Cossette, and Saint Maverick stayed close enough that no one dared to try anything openly.

’Honestly, the problem right now isn’t the corporations trying underhanded tricks to recruit me.’

’It’s these cyborgs.’

The streets were taken over by discarded failures. Machines that had once been human. They had no real awareness left, only broken routines and flashes of aggression.

Sometimes they stood still for hours, staring at nothing.

Sometimes they attacked without warning.

That made traveling through the City dangerous. Not to mention the people—the human inhabitations of the City—who kept eyeing me.

"I don’t see any other race than humans here," I said as we walked.

"That’s normal. We believe humans have the most computability with machines, so they are the only target of our research," Saint Dexter replied.

I nodded, letting him continue.

"Humans have the highest adaptability among all races. The same is true for machines. You can fit a new component to a machine depending on the situation, and it can adapt to almost anything. That’s why we believe humans are the ultimate machine, created by the [True God]."

He paused for a moment before adding, "It’s also the reason we operate only on humans. They have the highest chances of success."

I glanced to the side without turning my head fully.

Yuna, who had been listening quietly, had gone still.

Her face was stiff.

She... was angry.

This was the first time I had seen her like this.

She had found out how the discarded cyborgs on the roads were created. And how Saints and Saintesses were made.

That made her terribly angry.

’Yuna, are you alright?’

"..."

’Yuna?’

I let out a quiet sigh.

In this place, the World of Innovation, far out in the desert, there was a massive factory network that had once belonged to Legion.

Legion, the last Emperor of Nocthera Empire, might be dead, but his work wasn’t.

The factories kept running, producing weapons, automatons, and other types of machines.

The automatons created like this—through Legion’s factories—had artificial souls, also known as machine souls.

And because Legion had access to the System, those machine souls had access to it as well, even if it was limited.

The System Church captured those machines.

Then they ’fused’ them with humans.

Most of the time, the result was a misshapen cyborg with limited access to the System and no real sanity left.

It would be just a broken mix of instincts, routines, and half-functioning commands.

In rare cases, a cyborg came out the other side with full access to the System and a mind that still worked.

Those were the ones they called Saints and Saintesses.

Which meant that every groaning pile of metal that wandered the streets, every berserk figure that attacked without warning, had once been human.

I was still thinking about that when I noticed a trashcan near the side of the road.

This sight was perfectly normally.

The Corps was never bothered maintaining anything that wasn’t directly useful.

With berserk cyborgs roaming around and corporations that didn’t care about public order, sanitation was low on the list of priorities.

Garbage on the streets was normal.

But...

I stiffly walked towards the heap of garbage.

Because...

’Henry.’

He was inside.

Half of his face was torn open, exposing metal pipes and wiring where skin and bone should have been.

Small electric sparks flickered from his body, snapping and fading like a broken machine.

His eyes were open.

There was no light in them.

’So they failed the operation and threw him away.’

The fact that he wasn’t even moving, not like the other berserk cyborgs, meant something else too.

’They didn’t just discard him. They destroyed him and made sure no one else could get anything of value out of him.’